We've rerun a special report on search numbers. The search numbers now reflect the period of time from midnight September 10/11 through noon September 12, a 36-hour period. We ran a list of the top 50 terms, which you will find instead of last week's Lycos 50 on the left. We've dispensed with the usual arrows and numbers for the time being.
These topics have been added up and edited for spelling like the normal Lycos 50. As usual, we did not include news organizations or broad topics. The most popular news organization searched, by far, is CNN, followed by the BBC, MSNBC, and ABC News.
As always, Lycos News is updated with the latest information on the terrorist attacks and their aftermath.
When comparing searches from the first 12 hours to searches from the last 24 hours, searches for news organizations have gone down tremendously, while searches for concrete topics such as World Trade Center and Osama Bin Laden have stayed constant. Searches for Nostradamus have gone up. This is because of an email hoax going around that says that Nostradamus made the following prediction:
In the year of the new century and nine months/From the sky will come a great King of Terror. The sky will burn at 45 degrees (NY is 45). Fire approaches the great new city. In the city of god there will be a great thunder, Two brothers torn apart by chaos (Twin Towers), while the fortress endures (Pentagon), the great leader will succumb (Bush "we will find those responsible.")", "The third big war will begin when the big city is burning." - Nostradamus 1654
Nostradamus died in 1566, by the way, so he could not have made a prediction in 1654. This hoax originated with a student at Brock University in Canada in the 1990s, appearing on a web page essay on Nostradamus. That particular quatrain was offered by the page's author, Neil Marshall, as a fabricated example to illustrate how easily an important-sounding prophecy can be crafted through the use of abstract imagery. He pointed out how the terms he used were so deliberately vague they could be interpreted to fit any number of cataclysmic events.
Perhaps it is Neil Marshall, not Nostradamus, who is the true seer.
For more information on this hoax, please visit the Snopes Urban Legends website, from which I gathered this information.
We've taken a look at the variety of queries that people used in order to search for information on the crisis. Each week we add together misspellings and other searches in order to get our search totals for each subject. If you would like to see the hundreds of ways people searched on Tuesday and Wednesday, please click here.
For those wondering why Whitney Houston was so popular, it has nothing to do with the current crisis. Tuesday morning she received many searches due to rumors that she had gone into rehab following a non-appearance at Monday night's Michael Jackson concert. Her searches also plummeted after noon September 11, despite being very high from midnight to noon September 11.
Click here for Tuesday's original Lycos 50 report, with the commentary on the new Lycos 50 ending September 8, 2001.
Click here for Tuesday's special report on the first three hours of searches for the tragedy.
